Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Mulholland Dr.
Lowest review score: 0 Jojo Rabbit
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. Burke and Hare
    Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.
  2. London Town
    The film evinces a clear-eyed sense of the limits that a capitalistic society places on its working class.
  3. Austin Found
    The conspicuous means by which Will Raee stacks the deck against Leanne, the real victim of this story, is matched only by a moral grandstanding that seeks to condemn rather than understand the character’s decisions.
  4. In the Tall Grass
    Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Broken Tower
    It’s tonally flat and a little too impressed with its own elliptical construction. Yet there’s something about Franco’s desire to escape the straitjacket of the biopic’s pat psychologizing and greatest-hits structure that makes his film feel at least honest in its missteps.
  6. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
    Evangelion 2.0 evolves the original show’s central conceit of being alone together with other people in leaps and bounds. The problem with that is: Neon Genesis Evangelion was never a leaps-and-bounds kind of show.
  7. The Flowers of War
    This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.
  8. Ballad of a Small Player
    The film’s ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of its protagonist’s world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him.
  9. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The Lorax is a modest gem, failing to significantly enhance its source material's ideas but still delivering a zany, rollicking, multi-character version of Seuss's environmental cautionary tale.
  10. My Spy
    Peter Segal’s film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The film feels like it’s content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch.
  12. The Oranges
    As much as the dialogue in the film voices an attitude of self-liberation and champions the positives of severing accepted social constraints, it seems to be constantly taking one step forward and two steps back.
  13. We Are Your Friends
    As Zac Efront's Cole tiptoes away from his past, the film keenly observes a character who doesn't know how to secure his future, or his identity.
  14. Ashby
    The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.
  15. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    This film buries its soul beneath its own pretentious rubble, and the youthful, labyrinthine mind in which it places viewers feels less like an offbeat vehicle for healing than it does a kaleidoscopic prison.
  16. Immortals
    Dashing across the screen in all its bloody, gilded glory, the awesome and beautiful Immortals marks an all-win scenario.
  17. Habermann
    Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.
  18. Mirror Mirror
    For all its pomp and fabulosity, Mirror Mirror is actually Tarsem Singh's most minimalistic effort, a dialed-down game board of elaborate pieces that's akin to the human chess set captained by Julia Robert's evil Queen Clementianna.
  19. El Chicano
    Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.
  20. The Calling
    The premise of faith-based assisted suicide as a motivating factor for a madman's killing spree is initially intriguing, but quickly revealed as solemn window dressing.
  21. The Addams Family
    Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point.
  22. Johnny English Reborn
    As ticklish as one might find the idea of an equivalent Mr. Bean character occupying the driver's seat of a James Bond parody, it's likely that even a competent manifestation of such a scenario would pale in comparison to what Mike Myers and Jay Roach pulled off with apparent ease in their Austin Powers films.
  23. Hunky Dory
    Director Marc Evans's monotonous style keeps the film earthbound.
  24. Rebecca
    The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.
  25. You Should Have Left
    David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.
  26. Unlocked
    With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.
  27. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.
  28. Honey Don't!
    The film is paced in such a languid, dreamy way that it’s hard to get a grasp on how each scene connects to the larger themes or the larger mystery until fairly late.
  29. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    There are protracted moments of humor, fright, and pathos in Frozen Empire, but as it’s all so scattershot and disconnected, the film ends up being defined by its lack of conviction when it comes to exploring its ideas to the fullest.
  30. Rosebush Pruning
    Only cheap shock value can be gleaned from the film’s cavalcade of blood, semen, animal carcasses, dick pics, and erotic toothbrushing.
  31. Reminiscence
    Reminiscence’s noir adornments inadvertently feel closer to parody than loving homage.
  32. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
  33. The Comedy
    Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.
  34. King Arthur
    Revisionist mythmaking of the most bland variety, the Jerry Bruckheimer produced King Arthur purports to tell the true tale of the ancient British hero and his valiant Knights of the Round Table by stripping away the magic, mystery, and majesty of the fable and replacing it with grim n' grimy realism.
  35. Dance First
    Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.
  36. The Nun
    The Nun is the cinematic equivalent of a Conjuring-inspired maze at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.
  37. If I Stay
    The film, based on the novel by Gayle Forman, is an almost deliberate confirmation of Alison Bechdel's claim that women in film are so often shown only in relation to men.
  38. Don't Breathe 2
    The film’s gore is just as likely to invoke fear as to serve as a killer punchline to one of Rodo Sayagues’s set pieces.
  39. Damsel
    At its best, Damsel suggests a dark fantasy riff on Neil Marshall’s The Descent.
  40. Musical Chairs
    The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.
  41. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Jamie Dornan somehow manages to render his sculpted beauty moot, which throws a major wrench in the gears for a film dependent on eroticism.
  42. Rebel in the Rye
    The whole affair suggests dramatic Tetris, and it leeches the artist and his process of any mystery.
  43. Shotgun Wedding
    The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.
  44. The Good Catholic
    Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.
  45. Play Dirty
    Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.
  46. The Whole Truth
    The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.
  47. Capone
    Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.
  48. Earwig and the Witch
    The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.
  49. Mortal Kombat II
    Mortal Kombat II is done waiting around. It’s ravenous to get down to bloody business.
  50. Reversion
    While Reversion sets up a complex communication platform for a universe being slowly ripped apart, it doesn't know how to relate this idea in human terms.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New Jerusalem
    Unlike the soul-searching characters from Old Joy, which also stars Will Oldham, Ike and Sean always feel as if they've fallen out of the sky just for the film's setup.
  52. Horns
    For a story so unconventional, it's executed without director Alexandre Aja's typical commitment to anarchic awe.
  53. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.
  54. Two Shots Fired
    The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Meg
    Jaws works as both a horror film and a human drama. The Meg doesn't aspire to the earlier film's pathos (its flagrant callbacks to Jaws draw attention to how grotesquely adolescent it is by comparison), but that's because it's above all else a movie-star vehicle, and it succeeds on that front.
  56. A Man Called Horse
    Touted at the time of its release as a comparatively enlightened western, A Man Called Horse now looks like well-researched sensationalism—and is, admittedly, all the better for it.
  57. Joker: Folie à Deux
    In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.
  58. Dolly
    One senses that Rod Blackhurst knows that Dolly is undernourished, but his attempts to jazz it up by splitting it into transparently titled chapters only calls further attention to that dearth of imagination.
  59. Project X
    Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.
  60. Another Happy Day
    Hell is family in Another Happy Day, a portrait of one clan's reunion for a wedding that overflows with characters even more repugnant than the irony of its groan-worthy title.
  61. American Mary
    The filmmakers certainly exaggerate (i.e. exploit) their subject, but for a community that prides itself on shock value, there seems no sufficient alternative.
  62. The Last Days on Mars
    The film's visual construction is spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.
  63. The Upside
    The film becomes overrun by an increasingly preachy and tiresome series of life lessons about race, class, and love.
  64. The Magic of Belle Isle
    This gooey reteaming of Rob Reiner and Morgan Freeman is crammed tight with baldly manipulative elements, its tearjerker quota busting at the seams.
  65. The Public
    The film is a clunky, overwritten attempt to pack as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.
  66. Dark Glasses
    After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.
  67. The Queen of Spain
    Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.
  68. Detour
    The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Back in Action
    Seth Gordon’s film is largely, and awkwardly, beholden to the most banal of spy tropes.
  70. IF
    The most charitable read on John Krasinski’s IF is that using your imagination shouldn’t be bound by traditional story structure, so why should a film about unfettered imagination need the same?
  71. Instant Dreams
    While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.
  72. Honest Thief
    The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.
  73. Wolves
    Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.
  74. The Watchers
    Pacing is a conspicuous problem and the rushed third act threatens to crumble as The Watchers becomes overloaded with revelations and mythology that strain a foundation barely braced to hold their weight.
  75. Every Secret Thing
    It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.
  76. Stung
    The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.
  77. Second Act
    A blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist helps turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.
  78. Fun Mom Dinner
    The film is lazily content to simply put its female characters through the potty-mouthed, gross-out comedy ringer.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    U.N. Me isn't all sneering, and it certainly makes its points.
  80. The Oregonian
    It's the kind of movie you'd find in someone's VHS collection, decide to watch based on the box art and title, and end up switching out for "The House of the Devil" instead.
  81. The Burning Sea
    The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.
  82. Killing Bono
    Rather than organically develop its characters, it charts their evolution via silly outfit changes, treating the early '80s as a costume bin for flavor-of-the-week aping gags, with the band going from Gary Numan style shirts and skinny ties to lavish glam-rock costumes.
  83. Held
    The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.
  84. Destination Wedding
    The way Destination Wedding uses misanthropy to augment screwball tropes ends up being its undoing.
  85. Life of the Party
    Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.
  86. Come and Find Me
    Aaron Paul possesses an innate everyman quality that lends itself well to writer-director Zack Whedon's film.
  87. The Devil and Father Amorth
    The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.
  88. Samaritan
    Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.
  89. [REC] 3: Genesis
    If a fourth entry wasn't already in the works, [Rec] 3: Genesis could have easily represented the nail in the franchise's coffin.
  90. Tracers
    The lusterless camerawork keys itself almost empathetically to the drab reality of the film's spaces, settled and unsettled alike, but it can't enliven the hackneyed plot.
  91. Pain & Gain
    An outrageous based-on-real-life tale that's perfectly suited to director Michael Bay's insanely overblown stylistic and thematic temperament.
  92. Straw Dogs
    Despite Lurie's part-time efforts to lend the film some sense of place, the impulse to hot-ify everything from Peckinpah's considerably more earthbound original ultimately outpaces his meager good intentions.
  93. Black or White
    Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.
  94. A Night in Old Mexico
    Red is the kind of lazily written, thankless curmudgeon role that uses the trials of advanced age for cheap laughs rather than harnessing a veteran actor's talent to engage our empathy.
  95. Coldwater
    It comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft of this movie soon after graduating high school.
  96. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is little more than a clunky, Nolan-esque exercise in instruction-manual cinema.
  97. The Boy
    Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.
  98. The Prowler
    What the film lacks in narrative drive, coherence, and performance, it makes up with thoughtful lighting, strong cinematography from Raoul Lomas and an uncredited João Fernandes, and, of course, Savini’s lovingly overblown and impossible splatter effects.
  99. The Wayward Cloud
    Tsai's most off-putting work is nonetheless worthy of intense and ongoing consideration.
  100. Locked
    Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.
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